A Blueprint for Talent Integration

INITIAL THOUGHTS

"People are our greatest assets. People are also our greatest inhibitors."

The two opposing sides of the same coin in Emmanuel Erba's quote above integrate into two mindsets rigorously analyzed by Liz Wiseman in her fascinating book Multipliers: the Multiplier and the Diminisher mindset

"We see the Diminisher-Multiplier model as a continuum, with a few people at the extremes and most of us somewhere in between."

Each mindset emerges from and is perpetuated by the gap between intention and outcome - to the extent that one can seem a Multiplier to some, and a Diminisher to others.

There is a quiz available on the Wiseman Group website, open to anyone wishing to uncover personal Accidental Diminisher or "inhibitor" tendencies often disguised (and interpreted) as best intentions. The guide and video tips accompanying the quiz results are designed to raise awareness and help leaders course correct. The book Multipliers shares further guidance on Accidental Diminisher or "inhibitor" remedies, along with Multiplier discipline guidelines, practices and habits.

By raising our awareness regarding our own "inhibitor" tendencies as leaders, we carve out paths towards becoming intelligence amplifiers able to multiply the energy of our teams instead of draining it. We embrace agility at the core of execution beyond hierarchical and bureaucratic limitations, and foster diversity of thought in strategizing while minimizing dissent, conflict, disengagement.

Such awareness-rich inflection points feed the Multipliers in each of us and strengthen our conviction that "people are our greatest assets."

Out of the many positive changes that can occur in awareness-enlightened environments, two stand out as I am getting closer to the heart of what I'd like to share in this post.

First, it is precisely within such awareness-enlightened environments that talent development can become our forte as leaders of leaders.

Second, such contexts free our Multiplier mindset to recognize and forgive any of our former Diminisher blunders.

In his 2022 book The Earned Life, Marshall Goldsmith, a Multiplier par excellence, shares that he is "always glad to be an accomplice in other people’s epiphanies" and calls this realization and the freedom that comes with it the Every Breath Paradigm:

"Forgive your previous self and move on."

Marshall Goldsmith's legacy as Multiplier is carried on by his 100 Coaches Community known as MG 100 including Multipliers like: Liz Wiseman, Jennifer Paylor, Whitney Johnson, Ekpedeme "Pamay" M. Bassey, Michael Bungay Stanier and other remarkable thought leaders. And new virtuous cycles can continue with each of us.

Welcoming new talent is a beautiful opportunity to start co-creating and multiplying impact within and across any team.

EARLY TALENT DEVELOPMENT & INTEGRATION OPPORTUNITIES

Following recruitment, the very first day of onboarding presents an early opportunity to integrate a new joiner into a team and organization.

Onboarding and integrating talent require two very different sets of actions.

This distinction was one of my key takeaways from a November session led by IMD Professor Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days.

Successful implementation of any scope in the long term hinges on a successful combination of both, namely a well-conducted onboarding process - traditionally the focus in most organizations - and an early integration process meant to bring together the new joiner and a most often inherited - rather than a new - team.

While different organizational contexts inevitably add specific flavors to what this looks like in practice, the same difference and combination between talent integration and onboarding are at play in both internal transitions and in transitions involving external hires.

I recently had a chance to apply my knowledge and expertise, including what I learnt from Professor Michael Watkins on transition management, while integrating and onboarding a new member in my current team.

I would like to share with you, my professional network of infinite learners, a roadmap for a talent integration day to precede role-specific onboarding.

Ideally experienced in person, one day dedicated to integrating and connecting with talent can turn into the "glue" that binds the team together - new and existing members alike. Taking team time to continue to re-connect and integrate moving forward will strengthen ties and make work flow with ease, purpose and impact as challenges and crises will not fail to make a sudden appearance.

I hope that this roadmap inspires further thought and unleashes your imagination to uncover new ways to integrate and re-connect talent from day one.

A TALENT INTEGRATION BLUEPRINT: ONBOARDING DAY 1

One way to lean into a discussion about personal values is by revisiting shared values, which, in the case of Capgemini, are over half-a-century old.

Integration can only start at a personal level, with

"You" is meant as an invitation for everyone attending to contribute.

For us to discover who was joining our team and for the new joiner to discover who we are, we used a selection of beautiful questions.

First, an open list of questions organized into four categories: Life, Love, Future and People. Each of us picked a question to answer and/or to ask someone.

Among our picks, here are two about the future and one about people:

• What are your hopes for your future? Is there anything you would like to achieve?
• Can you name or think of 3 things you would put on your bucket list?
• Do you think people are generally good, bad, or an equal mix? Why do you think that?

After this warm-up, we each took some time to reflect and capture personal responses in writing to a set list of questions to later look back to. Having prepared one slide per team member in advance we used the reflection time well, filling in prompts like

1. What kind of team member am I? I am...
2. The one thing I can teach others...
3. The one thing I am known for at work...
4. My one superpower which could be of help is...
5. A metaphor that speaks for who I am...

with the fifth being an invitation to pick any meaningful picture or set of pictures as a visual metaphor.

Curious to explore the shape of our careers, we moved on to identifying the closest matching visual representations that we could think of.

The ascending line was a common first-thought favorite.

That was before introducing the concept of a "squiggly" career.

According to co-authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis:

"A squiggly career is full of change and challenge, where the future is fluid not fixed and where we can develop in lots of different directions. For over 100 years, we’ve looked to the ‘ladder’ for the idea of what good career development looks like. But today, this linear concept is out of sync with our reality. It assumes we’re all motivated by the same thing (becoming more senior), that we all work in places where endless promotions are possible (at a time when organizations are looking to reduce hierarchy) and that any direction but ‘up’ is bad. This outdated concept leads to comparison, unhealthy competition, and people losing confidence. We need to lose the ladder and embrace our squiggly career reality."

Their motivation for writing this book was "to stop learning being limited by ladders and share the career skills that can help everyone succeed. Since our 1st book came out, careers have become even ‘squigglier’ and these skills ever more important."?

This concept led to an exciting "slalom skiing" conversation between pivotal moments, achievements and challenges in each of our careers.

Quite some fun and quite some learning that was.

To top it up - especially as we were diving into challenges, I introduced the five phases of a crisis and the nine supporting skills discussed by Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten in their recently launched book The Prepared Leader. Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient than Before.

"It’s one thing to share the theory behind years and years of research with the academic community; it’s another to explore its practical applications with people who are facing the very challenges I research in their everyday work."

Erika H. James' words above inspire a shift from theory to action. Like many of the students and alums engaged in conversation with her, many of us in the world of work stand to gain from fielding crisis-related questions. I find that they keep us alert and open to what can come our way, and that they provide an escape from "the cycle of panic and neglect" that Erika H. James and Lynn Perry Wooten mention in their book, borrowing the phrase from Jim Yong Kim, World Bank's former president.

Bridging academic and corporate worlds is something that I found myself doing in my own squiggly career, which is probably why such research findings resonate with me and why I feel compelled to share and discuss them with my team.

One of the crises affecting us at work, apart from the COVID-19 crisis and the ongoing socio-economic and political unrest, is burnout.

Inspired by Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic, and Jonathan Malesic's insights from his book The End of Burnout, we discussed ways we can change how we work and start creating sustainable work practices that prevent or put an end to burnout for us and the people we work with.

Definitely not a one-time conversation, burnout has entered any leader's agenda and is now part of any team's conversation thread - virtually or in person. As a topic, burnout is paired up with counterpart topics like resilience, well-being, even joy. Videos like Natasha Wallace's Intro to Resilience pack a lot of insight in minutes. The same is true for compact courses like How Managers Can Prevent Team Burnout from Jennifer Moss, currently offered by LinkedIn free of charge for a limited time. Light and practical bite-sized books like Liggy Webb's series can take only about 10 minutes to read and help people keep fit for the future to face life’s various challenges.

Important note: serendipity is a great part of integrating and connecting, so surf those waves if you can, as they come your way. We were lucky to discover that another one of our corporate University teams was on site, so we took the chance and went for lunch together. Extra fun! (even if we did that the following day)

After the lunch break, we explored what flow means to each of us and how we can get into flow.

We started by watching Diane Allen's TED talk above and followed her 3-step Flow Strategy? system to discover how to access our flow state.

Flow, in Diane Allen's words, is the gateway to loving your job.

"You know those moments when you are so focused that time flies by, things pop into place with ease, and new ideas come from out of the blue? You know... It's those times when you REALLY enjoy what you're doing.

It's called the Flow State: An optimal state of mind when we feel our best and perform our best.

The funny thing is that we're already wired for it. Flow is so natural that people say all the time 'I didn't know there's a name for that!'

What if you could spend more time in Flow?

What if being in Flow increases engagement, influence, and ignites team synergy?

What if Flow was the key to increasing the meaning, joy, and fulfillment in your work?

It is worth investing time in understanding one's flow strategy in the solitude of our reflective moments. It is even more powerful to share that with your team. Doing that in person brought us closer together and marked a starting point for future conversations on preferred ways of working and collaboration styles.

There is something that always piques my curiosity: what is on my team's learning menu, so we took some time to discuss personal needs, preferences and ambitions around learning.

Similar to the discussion on flow, this is an important starting point that indicates to your team: learning is key to our roles. As we focus our efforts around strategizing and delivering learning programs, maintaining and evolving our own learning agility is critical.

Anyone with some history within an organization can recommend learning assets, hubs or events that made an impression on them to someone joining the team. They can also recommend colleagues to follow on various platforms, newsletters and research bodies like our Capgemini Research Institute to subscribe to.

Take the opportunity to tune into what people add to their learning menu on a regular basis, explore together how that changes depending on context and circumstance. This can become a great way to stay connected and informed as a team and capitalize on the team's collective intelligence. One learning sample that we looked at together was the recent Kick-Off of the fifth edition of our Capgemini RISE Event dedicated to the HR Community, presented by our HR leaders Anne Lebel and Siham Benayad. And yes, healthy snacks and popcorn were involved.

Refocusing to one of our core values, trust, we then spent time completing two activities.

First, we took the Trust Quotient Assessment at this link to learn how to leverage our strengths and opportunities in order to build and strengthen trust-based relationships.

This is an open access assessment provided by Trusted Advisor Associates.

Second, we watched a recorded session by Jennifer Paylor on Coaching as a Trusted Advisor from the same RISE event mentioned above, which inspired further thoughts on connecting the benefits of coaching with the value of trust.

As a company with well over 300 000 people, we are fortunate to have access to a wealth of resources and talent that we can showcase to new joiners.

There are many options for the second activity in any organizational context. I recommend looking for someone in your team or company who is a role-model for building trust-based relationships and inviting them to connect or share resources to bring out the best in the people they work with.

Finally, I shared with the team some lessons in transition management from Professor Michael Watkins on how to accelerate leader, team, and organizational transitions in today's complex world of work, how to match strategy to situation and, last but not least, how to manage ourselves through transitional periods.

Two resources that can be used to inform similar conversations on this topic are Michael Watkins' recent Training Industry article 8 Best Practices for Effective Virtual Onboarding and another piece from Francesca Giulia Mereu on Your 5 Batteries: A Guide to Personal Energy Management.

There are further topics that did not fit our one-day agenda, which I plan to explore at another time. These connect with resources on psychological safety and employee engagement and discussions around questions like What comes first: employee engagement or psychological safety? I recommend this podcast where Dr. Timothy A. Clark and Junior Clark discuss this very question, and will share with my network an open invitation to an event coming up on November 17 to explore more nuances of?psychological safety.

I would like to conclude with thanks to our greatest assets, the Multipliers who make us all smarter and better in their presence and inspire us every time we cross visible and invisible paths.

Emmanuel Erba , Inma Casero , Pierre Hessler , Liz Wiseman , Marshall Goldsmith , Jennifer Paylor , Tecla Palli-Sandler M.A., CPC , JANANI D'SILVA , Whitney Johnson , Ekpedeme "Pamay" M. Bassey , ?? Michael Bungay Stanier , Michael Watkins , Frances Frei , Anne Morriss , Tsedal Neeley , Helen Tupper , Sarah Ellis , Erika H. James , Lynn Perry Wooten , Jennifer Moss , Jonathan Malesic , Diane Allen , Natasha Wallace , David Wilkinson , Olivier Sibony , Liggy Webb , Sally Rhodes , Graham Herbert (he/him) , Richard Barton , Alejandra Salazar She/Her/Ella , Vanessa Baldi , Gleydison Farias , Warren Pinto , Neil Robinson , Nick Greenall , Amit Kumar , Stijn Follet , Jonathan Kessel-Fell , Jolanta Stepniak , Edith Combier , Lee Hawkes-Schubert ??????? , Anne Lebel , Siham Benayad , Steven Smith , Dr. Regis Chasse , Nada Conan , Nathalie Marchau , Francesca Giulia Mereu , Amy Edmondson , Timothy R. Clark , Junior Clark , Atma Anur